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And his gaze moved lower still, to take her all in—
But he stopped.
Because his mind simply refused to make sense of what he saw.
Worse, what it meant.
The bells of the city began to ring out the hour. Eight strikes, and each one like a poisoned spear thrust deep into his chest.
Her hands crept up and covered her belly, but it was too late. And her hands were too small.
Because Julienne Boucher had a giant belly. It was big, round and unmistakably pregnant.
Six months,something in him intoned.Six. Months.
Cristiano could not comprehend it.
He could not do more than stare.
“I didn’t know for a long time,” Julienne told him, hurriedly, though he wasn’t sure he could make sense of her words. Or anything outside of that lurching in him. That great, deep howl. “I wasn’t ill, you see. I was fairly fatigued, that’s all. But a bit of fatigue seemed like a reasonable response to working as hard as I’ve done for the past ten years. Or to what happened in Monte Carlo, even. And then there was the move out west and all the details of setting up a new life. All of those things are fatiguing, are they not?”
She was talking too fast. And he kept staring at that belly of hers, that enormous belly.
Where she carried a child.
Where she carriedhis—
But he couldn’t go there. His entire body and mind rejected it.
Julienne was still talking, her words tripping over each other. “When my clothes stopped fitting, I assumed it was because I was finally relaxing. Enjoying my food and no longer desperate to keep up appearances, always pretending I had nothing in common with that trashy little wannabe tramp who found you in Monte Carlo all those years ago. I congratulated myself on letting go, at last.”
Was that what she expected? His congratulations?
Cristiano’s throat worked, but he could not seem to produce a sound.
“So I didn’t understand until quite late,” she told him, her gaze wide and solemn. “A month ago, maybe six weeks, I happened to get out of the bath and look at myself in a mirror sideways. And then I began to count back.”
“Six months,” Cristiano said, as if from a great distance, and across the great desert of that howling thing in him.
“Six months,” Julienne agreed. She cleared her throat. “And I want to make something perfectly clear, Cristiano. This was not my intention. This was never my intention. I wanted the bookends we spoke of that night, nothing more. You owe me nothing.”
All he could do was stare at her. Not a ghost tonight. Not a common haunt, a memory he couldn’t shake.
But his own, personal demon, come to destroy him.
“I’m here because I thought it was the right thing to do. To tell you, I mean, but you should feel no sense of obligation. I truly mean that. Fleurette doesn’t think I need to tell you at all, but I know you are an honorable man. You have always been an honorable man. And I felt certain that you would wish to know, even if you don’t—”
The howling thing inside him stopped. But behind it was something far blacker. His rage.
He lifted his gaze to meet hers, his eyes like fire, and Julienne stopped talking.
Abruptly.
As if he’d slapped her.
Cristiano had never slapped a woman in his life, but in that moment, the chaos in him had control. And he could not have said what he might do next. He was a man allergic to uncertainty, and yet he hadno idea.
“Cristiano,” she began, carefully.
